Tongue-tied.

In the midst of our grieving over the passing of Kobe Bryant and eight other passengers who died tragically on his helicopter (including his daughter), we are once again forced to deal with the ugly stain of racism.

Most of you have either seen the video or heard the story of that MSNBC reporter who called the Los Angeles Lakers the Niggers while reporting on the passing of Kobe.

Many of you were quick to jump to her defense. It was a simple slip of the tongue. She would never say Nigger on the air like that, and on and on. The reporter herself put out a statement that she is not a racist, and that her Nigger shout out was just an honest mistake. 



"Stuttered on air"? Ahhhm no, I listened to the tape, and girlfriend paused before she said, "Nigger".
You ever wonder why it's only the folks in the majority population who always seem to make these types of "verbal slips"? You never hear a black reporter or commentator saying things like "in the National Honky League last night the Rangers beat the Red Wings in overtime."  Or, "the Minnesota Guineas beat the Michigan Wolverines this Saturday in a big football game." Why is it only the word Nigger that these folks seem to have a problem saying?

My thing is that girlfriend said this word like she has said it many times before. Sorry, it just flowed too easily for her for me to believe that this was a simple slip of the tongue. 

But hey, it is what it is. We have come to expect this type of behavior from some folks. What's sad is that her black and progressive friends over at MSNBC were so quick to defend her. They were quick to declare that they know what's in her heart, that she is not a racist, and blah blah blah. I am quite sure that if she was on FOX they would be calling her out as I am doing now. 

Instead, we get the following:

— Tiffany Cross (@TiffanyDCross) January 26, 2020

I know & work daily with @AlisonMorrisNOW. Like all my friends & colleagues, she doesn’t have racial epithets in her vocabulary. In the heat of breaking, emotional news, we fast talkers stumble & combine words, or reach for the wrong word & correct mid-stream. @NBCNewsNow @MSNBC https://t.co/Qv7XkFHkuU

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) January 26, 2020

Completely agree. You don’t know till you are in the heat of breaking news. Mistakes happen, we are human. I too know and work with @AlisonMorrisNOW and she is a kind, hard working professional. https://t.co/xvHgv4jdSt

— yasminvossoughian (@yasminv) January 26, 2020

I'm with 50 Cent with this one. Where is the outrage from the left? Are we only going to call out racism when it's out ideological enemies are being racist? I hope not, because if we do, we are going to let a lot of racism slide here in America.   

  

No words!

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Caption Saturday.

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Welcome to trumpistan.

Have you been watching the senate impeachment trial going on in Washington? The mismatch between the two sides when it comes to their legal advocates have been frightening. The republican legal team just keeps flooding the process with lies and lousy legal arguments. The democrats, on the other hand, have been on their game. If this was an actual game the referees would have invoked the mercy rule by now. Adam Schiff deserves a special place in history for his work on the senate floor in laying out the legal arguments to remove Mr. trump from office.

Of course all of this will not matter, because the trump cult members republicans in Washington have already decided that they will protect a corrupt and out of control president no matter what. Some of them will pretend to deliberate (I see you Susan Collins and Mitt Romney), and others, to their everlasting shame, will not even pretend to have an open mind. Holding on to power and getting reelected is far more important than honoring the oath they took to be impartial, and to respect the Constitution of the United States. To them, loyalty to trump is more important than loyalty to their country. Some of them, in violation of senate rules, are even walking out of the senate chambers while the democrats are making their arguments.

If Americans could turn away from The Bachelor and Dancing With The Stars long enough to watch the impeachment trial they might actually learn something about what the president did to get us to this point. The democrat House impeachment team has laid it out with sound factual arguments and demonstrative evidence.

The outcome of this particular trial is a fait accompli, and you could argue that we won't know the result of what is happening until November, which is when the American people will decide if we want to continue under this current regime.

Adam Schiff said the following: .

"When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

Those words were written by Alexander Hamilton in a letter to President George Washington, at the height of the Panic of 1792, a financial credit crisis that shook our young nation. Hamilton was responding to sentiments relayed to Washington as he traveled the country, that America, in the face of that crisis, might descend from “a republican form of Government,” plunging instead into “that of a monarchy.”

The Framers of our Constitution worried then—as we worry today—that a leader could come to power not to carry out the will of the people that he was elected to represent, but to pursue his own interests. They feared that a president could subvert our democracy by abusing the awesome power of his office for his own personal or political gain.

And so they devised a remedy as powerful as the evil it was meant to combat: Impeachment.

As the centuries have passed, our Founders have achieved an almost mythic character. We are aware of their flaws, certainly, some very painful and pronounced indeed. And yet, when it came to the drafting of a new system of government, never seen before and with no guarantee it could succeed, we cannot help but be in awe of their genius, their prescience, even, vindicated time and time again."

Not quite Mr. Schiff, because in trumpistan, none of that matters. 

*Pic from time.com

Caption Sunday.

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Lev brings the receipts.

*I watched the Lev Parnas interview on MSNBC last night, and he pretty much said what I thought was going to say: That Donald trump and the rest of his criminal cabal are all a bunch of liars.

The interview was right on time, because the house delivered their articles of impeachment to the senate yesterday. Not surprisingly, he made some pretty damning comments about what the president (and the Vice President)  knew and when they knew it.

Of course, as is to be expected, the trump apologists are already saying that we should not believe our lying ears. trump himself is saying that he doesn't even know the man. But we have seen the *pictures and videos of them together, so trump, once again, is lying through his fake teeth.

The problem is, of course, that this will have no effect on the 50 plus senators who have already decided that they are not going to vote to remove the president. The cowardly republican senators care too much about their political survival and filling their political PACs with trump donor money.

Watching them take an oath to be fair and to honor the Constitution today was surreal, because we all know that they will do no such thing. To his credit, turtle has pretty much admitted that he will not be impartial, and that he will vote to acquit the Orange Mobster.

I already know how this will all end, and it's sad, because the evidence against Donald J. trump is overwhelming. The senate will not vote to remove him,  and we will be stuck with him, at least until November.

Let's face it, the only way we will get rid of Donald J.trump is to vote him out.

Fortunately, we will not have to depend on 67 senators to do that. 

*Pic from cnn.com

 

The racism is the point.

The following essay was written by Robert Newby for The Morning Sun.

"The Donald Trump presidency is a perfect example of the costs of racism when comes to America’s current and future health as a nation. Donald Trump is president because a majority of white voters wanted him to be president. They wanted him to be president knowing that he demeans people of color. The jury is still out as to how many whites voted for him in spite of his racism, or how many voted for him because he was a racist? Either way, make no mistake white voters in white spaces voted for Trump in large numbers even though there was considerable evidence that he was a racist.

Following his grand entrance down the escalator to announce his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, Donald J. Trump exposed his racism by asserting disparaging stereotypes of a whole population. Central to the announcement of his candidacy was his vulgar labeling of “Mexicans” as “rapists and criminals.” That lack of civility was proof positive that the decorum and decency that would be normally expected of an American president was absent.

Beyond the racist name calling, the nation’s most prominent “birther” was none other than Donald J. Trump. “Birtherism” became a right-wing conspiracy theory to delegitimize Barack Obama’s right to be president. To disqualify Barack Obama, the theory is that he was really born in Nigeria, the home of his birth father. Even though Hawaii’s daily newspapers contemporaneously posted his August 4, 1961 birth in Honolulu, the conspiracy theory is that he was really born in his father’s homeland and that there was no birth certificate to prove his Hawaii birth.

The only reason Obama’s birth was questioned was because he is black. In spelling out the qualifications, the appropriate section of Article II of the Constitution reads: “No Person except a natural born Citizen of the United States …shall be eligible to the Office of the President….” So, to eliminate or make Barack Obama’s candidacy illegitimate, the conspiracy theorists among America’s right wing, spread the word that Barack Obama had no birth certificate to “prove” he was born in America.

The opposition to the Obama presidency gave rise to the anti-Obama Tea Party political movement. Simply, for much of White America, the thought of having an African American president was too much to take. The formation began following a rant by Rick Santelli on the Chicago Board of Trade in which he cast blame on President Obama for bailing out the nation’s economy, thereby avoiding a total economic collapse. Instead of getting credit for having saved the economy, the racist right-wing blamed Obama, America’s first Black President, for having increased America’s debt. (These same Tea Party Republicans and Donald Trump just cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations by $1.5 trillion, an alarming increasing of our debt!)

So, here we are with Trumpism in power and Tea Party rule. The white majority either has either ignored or endorsed the racism in this rule. By endorsing racism in America, this president after the Charlottesville white supremacist rallies, in which Heather Hire was killed, had the audacity to say “there were good people on both sides,” meaning that there were “some good people” who were white

Not only has this president proven himself to be racist, or the white nationalism he claims to embrace, he has proven himself to be unfit. He has shown strength in attacking our Western democracy friends but weakness in protecting us from our authoritarian enemies. He is owned by every two-bit dictator and a couple who represent real threats our nation and our friends. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it for Trump: “All roads lead to Putin.”

And then there is the corruption. With the Russians, according to the Mueller Report that the interference by the Russians to aid in the 2016 election of the Donald Trump and accepted by him. Now, Trump’s campaign corruption continues with him chasing conspiracy theories in the Ukraine. Even with this obvious violation of campaign finance law, he continues to have his considerable support from Republicans his supporters.

Today our nation and our politics are in crisis. White supremacy and racism got us here. While a majority of whites voted for Trump, 90% of African Americans voted against him. Also, other people of color voted against Trump to the tune of about 70%. People of color in America knew that because of Trump’s racism, his leadership and character were flawed.

In an earlier column, I pointed out that African Americans (and other people of color) are like “The Miner’s Canary” as warned by Lani Guinier in her book by that title some years ago. She used the analogy that coal miners used canaries to test gas levels. Guinier argues that the hostile treatment of blacks in America provides the warning of what is happening to all of America." {Source}

We can overlook the incompetence, the lies, and the lunacy of what is the trump presidency, but let us not overlook the racism and the hatred that his leadership has rekindled in America.

*Image from The Root.

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this picture.

Friends don't let friends read teleprompters while they are high.

So I guess everyone is just going to ignore the elephant in the room. 

Hello America! Your president either has a serious drug problem, or he is suffering from some sort of  medical issue that prevents him from being able to focus and read a few lines from a teleprompter. He could also have been heavily medicated by his handlers to keep him from going
off script. Whatever the case, it was very scary to watch him.

Honestly folks, this is not even funny anymore. Someone who cares about the man or his family should stage an intervention. 

Did you see that speech to the country Wednesday night? If it was meant to assure us that things would be alright, it missed the mark.  After watching who we elected to be our 45th president, I was terrified for all of us. (Yes, even you MAGA cultists.) And I know that those of you with a functioning brain were terrified as well. 

The man could not complete his words, his speech was slurred, and he was doing more sniffing than Al Pacino during the final scenes of Scarface. 

The really sad thing about all of this is that the main stream media didn't even address it. Some of them (I see you Joe Scarborough) even said that the president's speech, by his standard, was actually "measured". Huh?!  But wait, it gets worse, Lindsey Graham called it one of the all time great speeches. Right up there with Reagans's tear down the wall address. 

What are we doing here? Are we all going to just bury our heads in the sand together and pretend that there is not something seriously wrong with the man?

Thankfully, though,  it wasn't totally ignored. There were actually some real journalists who chose to write about it and call out the naked Emperor.

"In his address, the president threatened to invoke severe sanctions against Iran, but seemed amenable to deescalating the burgeoning military aggression. Still, the nine-minute address was packed with the president’s standard potpourri of falsehoods, lies, and bouts of incoherence. But the most striking aspect of his speech had less to do with what he said than how he said it. Which is to say, Trump was slurring and snorting through an address that was ostensibly designed to calm a nation on the brink of war.

Trump has never been a particularly graceful public speaker, but his mush-mouth sounded especially pronounced this morning. There was heaviness to his speech, as if he was struggling to talk through cottonmouth. He also had difficulty with the letter S, which he couldn’t pronounce without a drawn out hiss, as if he were a snake. One of the more flagrant examples entails the president mangling the pronunciation of “tolerated” while condemning terrorism.

“Tolerited” pic.twitter.com/2oDBNibR6Y

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 8, 2020

At the 6:50 mark in the video embedded up top, the president stumbled while trying to brag about his “historic accompliments.” He did manage to pronounce “accomplishments” correctly a few seconds later." [Source]

I bet he would have had no problem saying Barack Obama. The man holds a permanent place rent free in his head.

No choice but to kill.

The killing of Qasem Soleimani has had an interesting effect on the American psyche. trump cultists who wanted us to disengage from all foreign conflicts and get the hell out of the Middle East, have all of a sudden become Neocon war hawks. Why? Because there leader, the Orange Mobster, told them that it was cool to want war again. 

Let's forget, for a minute, that none of them knew who this man was a couple of weeks ago. It's only because their leader told them that this was a bad man in order to justify the administration's foolhardy move of assassinating a foreign general while he was in another country (Iraq), that they have now decided that Soleimani had to go.   

The trump administration has declared that Soleimani was up to no good, and that he had to be killed because he was an imminent threat to America and Americans. That by killing him, we were able to save many many lived. Of course, as is to be expected with this bunch, we are still waiting for something (anything) from this administration, to show us that they are telling the truth.  Given their sad history with the truth, though,  I suspect that they will not have any concrete evidence that this  assassination was done for all the right reasons.

The irony of all this, is that the trump administration, by killing this Iranian general, has unified all Iranians. Their hatred for America, and all things American, has just intensified. This is happening at a time when the leaders in Iran were vulnerable and their grip on that country was loosening because of all the economic sanctions. Now, having the people of Iran rise up against the leaders of that country, seems like a far away pipe dream.

Iran has vowed revenge, and they said that they will retaliate against America for the killing of their general.  I don't doubt that they will. I just hope that innocent people and our brave service men and women will not have to die because of the actions of a narcissist whose only concern is his ego.

Memo to my fellow Americans: You might want to put a hold on all exotic foreign vacations for awhile.

Image courtesy of  Atta Kenare / AFP - Getty Images

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Wag on, Donald.

Day after day your criminal behavior is slowly being exposed. You are terrified at the prospect of being removed from office after the shame of being impeached.  What do you do? You start a war to distract the American people.

"President Trump ordered the killing of the powerful commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, in a drone strike on the Baghdad International Airport early Friday, American officials said.

General Suleimani’s death was confirmed by official Iranian media.

“General Suleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “General Suleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.”

“This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans,” the statement added. “The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.” [Source]

It was only a matter of time before Donald trump had his own Wag the Dog moment.  Frankly, I am surprised that it took so long.  

Sadly, World War Three is now trending on twitter.

America, I am guessing that this is not how we wanted to start the new year.